LORD OF THE LEPERS

Mark 1:40-45

1 THE CRY

2 THE COMPASSION

3 THE CURE

1 THE CRY, v.40

The incident we have just read takes place on a day that begins in v. 35 of Mark 1. Take a look at v. 35 and see how Jesus started this day: “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place and there he prayed.”

Our Lord and Saviour begins this day alone … in the dark … on his knees … in communion with the Father. That’s important for us to see. Now, wen the disciples wake up, wipe the sleep out of their eye and realize that Jesus is gone - they hunt him down. Away he comes, off of his knees, back down to the people.

If you look back at Verses 29 and following, we read that just the day before, Jesus, still near the beginning of his ministry - has just healed an entire town of every disease … he’s cast out every demon afflicting the people there. So, on this new day, as he heads back into a world of people in need - you just know something big is going to happen. You know he’s going to show His glory … somehow. So, what wll he do?

And that brings us to v. 40 and our text: “And a lepeer came to him ...”. Stop right there. This is not a crowd, but one, solitary man in need. He makes his way to Jesus, looking for relief. The text clearly tells us what his problem is: He is, ‘A Leper’. Now we are so far removed from that time and place in history that leprosy doesn’t mean very much to most of us.

The people surrounding Jesus on this day and the first readers of Mark’s gospel would understand with crystal clear terror, EXACTLY how great is this man’s need.

Leprosy - the most horrific, hopeless disease you could possibly have in Jesus’ day.

The physical suffering is horrific. Camping season is coming. I trust that the weather will become summer-like in due course - and then some of us will go camping. When you are sitting around a campfire and you try to make Jiffy Pop popcorn with your hands - and the flames of the fire feel hotter and hotter … you’re shaking the tray ad your oven mitts start to burn and the container says, ‘DO NOT COOK OVER FIRE” - but you know Mr. Jiffy doesn’t really mean it - since that’s whole point of Jiffy Pop - it’s campfire food. So, you persevere - you keep shaking, you hear the sizzle coming from inside the package and you wait for the first kernel to pop - - it takes so long, your oven mitt sarts to smoke an burn and your hand gets hotter and hotter .... you’re too close to the fire and an ember pops and lands on your bare arm -you say, ‘OUCH! That’s HOT!” You don’t like the pain … but that little burn is GOOD! It’s the God-given, early warning system to your brain that is telling you, ‘Hey, Dumb-dumb, fire is hot and it will seriously harm you if you don’t keep your distance.”

The problem with leprosy is not that it causes pain - but exactly the opposite - it takes away your body’s ability to feel pain. A leper touches a hot coal from fire … and he doesn’t feel the burn.

He graps a boilin pot and feels … nothing. Skin falls off, fingers and arms and toes and legs … DIE - they shrivel up and drop away, leaving a grotesque figure that is DYING .... EVEN AS IT IS ALIVE!

In recent years, the research of Dr. Paul Brand and others has proven that the disfigurement associated with Hansen’s disease comes solely because the body’s warning system of pain is destroyed. The disease acts as an anesthetic, bringing numbness to the extremities as well as to the ears, eyes, and nose. The devastation that follows comes from such incidents as reaching one’s hand into a charcoal fire to retrieve a dropped potato, or washing one’s face with scalding water, or gripping a tool so tightly that the hands become traumatized and eventually stumplike. In Third-World countries, vermin sometimes chew on sleeping lepers. Thus, Dr. Brand, after performing corrective surgery on a leper, would send a cat home with him as normal post-operative proceedure. Dr. Brand calls the disease a “painless hell,” and indeed it is. The poor man in our story had not been able to feel for years, and his body was full of leprosy, mutilated from head to foot, rotten, stinking, repulsive.

Luke, Dr. Luke, recounts thi same incident in chapter 5 of his gospel and tells us that this man doesn’t just HAVE leprosy … he is “‘FULL’ of leprosy.”

He’s a walking corpse. In fact, the rabbis spoke of lepers as, ‘the living dead.’ The Jewish historian, Josephus, wrote that lepers were treated ‘in no way different’ from a corpse - and when it comes to healing leprosy - well that was considered to be not a stitch easier than raising a cold corpse from the dead. When this man was diagnosed with leprosy, he was robbed of every last ray of hope.

The hopelessness and disfigurement is not the only problem. Leprosy comes with a stigma, as well.

ILLUSTRATION

Leviticus 13:45-46 - “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shll cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ (46) He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

See the stigma that came wtih the curse of the disease? Leprosy is more than a disease, it is a sentence.

“UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!” Imagine a life with a stigma so great that everywhere you go, you are alone. The law says that the leprous person is not permitted to get any closer to a healthy person thn 50 paces - 150 feet from contact with any healthy person! This isn’t punishment for the sake of cruelty - the rest of society has to be protected from catching and spreading the deadly disease. It’s a contagion.

See this man, in his life of hopelessness, condemned to his painless, solitary, HELL. Ostracized from society, he is separated from his family - - THERE IS NO Doctor who can make him whole again and, Oh how he must long to be free from this torturous disease relentlessly ravaging his body. How much more does he long to be free from the stigma that is indelibly attached to him?

UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN! He is poison. If he enters a house, teh house becomes contaminated. If he statnds under a tree, anyone who passes under that tree is polluted. Do you see the implications? This man, the leper, isn’t just polluted … HE IS POLLUTION. And when his uncleanness comes into contact with anyone else’s cleanness - his uncleanness wins - and the people who WERE clean - become, because of him - unclean themselves.

Do you see the connection between this man and us? Do you recognize that, from birth, you are .... I am .... Every one of us is … A LEPER?! You cannot get teh meaning of this text, if you don’t get that point.

Leprosy - loathsome, spreading, seemingly incurable. Just like sin: Loathsome, spreading, seemingly incurable.

And unless you have experienced a profound sense, ‘I am a leper’ … that, ‘Even as I live, I am spiritually dead and decaying with this loathsome disease.” Unless you have known this .... you are NOT a Christian.

You may have felt the need for comfort in crisis - you may have been on the hunt for purpose in life, or hope for life after death ....

.... but until you realize: “It’s not just that I DO wrong … I AM WRONG … and helpless to cure myself.” Until you realize that humbling truth .... you CANNOT be saved.

We have developed so many ways to hide our uncleanness from ourselves. I see it on social media all the time. People throwing charges, like grenades, at others … and completely lacking any sense of humility - constantly on the hunt for an argument as if to say, “I’m not perfect … nobody is … but compared to you … I’m really not bad at all. I’m on the right side of every moral argument - and that makes me okay.”

Really? Is that how God sees it? Do you rememer the parable of the Prodigal Son? How many main characters are there in that famous parable of Jesus? Lots of people say, “Well, there were bit parts along the way, but there were TWO main characters: the profligate son and his father.”

But that’s not true. There were THREE equally important characters: There’s the father and his wayward son, for sure. But there was also the ELDER brother - the one who stayed home the whole time. He doesn’t get as much screen time, but he is every bit as important as teh wayward son, because he’s a window into the soul of so many ‘good and morally upstanding’ people.

… Self-secure, self-righteous, smug. When dad says, “Kill the fatted calf - prepare a feast for my son who has returned, filthy though he is - for my son, who was dead, is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

And big brother spits out his disgust: “That kid was throwing away your hard-earned moneey in disgusting immorality and then mucking around with pigs! How dare you throw a party for him, when I was here the whole time -working for you?! WORKING FOR YOU!”

That parable is every bit as much about the sin of the BIG BROTHER who kept his nose clean … as it is about the wayward brother who squandered everything in foolishness. The problem for that older brother is that he couldn’t see his own sin.

Maybe you can’t see. You’re boasting about your doctrine or social justice causes … but your impatience, your judgmentalism toward those who don’t measure up to you .... or maybe your judgmentalism is directed at those who make judgments themselves: “How dare that guy judge?!” Oh, do you see the irony?

The first step to getting clean is to admit, ‘I’m NOT clean.”

Ephesians 2:1, 3 - “And YOU were dead in trespasses and sins”, v. 3 - “All of us also lived … gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were BY NATURE objects of wrath.”

David, in Psalm 51, gives the true verdict on all of us, when he cries to God, “Surely, I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”

When Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal, the story ends in tragedy for the elder brother. Well, we actually aren’t exactly sure how it ends for him, because the father comes outside to find him - and pleads with him - and Jesus doesn’t tell us whether or not he listened to his dad. But the last actions that Jesus tells us of big brother - they’re tragic! The party for little brother is going on, inside the house - Dad is in there, little brother is in there, the loaded banquet table and the guests are in there … it’s a picture of heaven: God the Father throwing a party for the lost sinner who has been found!

… And the elder brother … REFUSES to go in. He stands on the outside, soaking in bitterness - because ‘this isn’t the way things are supposed to turn out.’ Good boys should be rewarded for their goodness - and ‘bad boys’ should get what’s coming to them. And that is CERTAINLY not a party.

And so - big brother SHUTS HIMSELF out of heaven.

DO you ever wonder why some people seem to start out so well as Christians, but not finish? Do you ever wonder why some people start out so well - and fall away? Some people will tell you that, ‘they lost their salvation’ - that’s why they walked away. But that’s not what the Scriptures say.

Paul, in Romans 8:29-30, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among may brothers. (30) And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” It’s the Golden Chain of Salvation - if God predestined you - he called you - if he called you to faith, he also justified you … if He justified you, he will glorify you - so sure is your glorification that Paul puts it in the ‘aorist’ - the past, the completed, sense. It is one unbroken chain from predestination to glorification.

Paul says the same thing, explicitly in Philippians 1:6, “He who began a good work in you WILL carry it on to completion, until the day of Christ.”

So, why do some seem to start out so well and not finish well? We all know people like that - it’s broken your heart. You tremble lest that be you. And you want to know how to not be one of those.

The Bible tells us, in 1 John 2:19, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it migt become plain that they all are not of us.”

The question is, “How can someone look so good, sometimes for so long, and yet never be saved?” The answer: “They have believed the devil’s lies and never really believed that their great need is Jesus and His finished work - the’ve never believed that they were the leper.

“My condition isn’t SO bad … give me some tips on being a better person, help me make smarter decisions and live right.” If that’s all you think you need .... you are a leper, whose hands have fallen off from the disease’s decay, saying, “I’m alright - just give me some tape and I’ll be good as new!”

When the news comes that Jesus is passing by - the leper shows the depth of his desperation. He breaks custom, breaks the law by breaking through the invisible boundary he’s supposed to keep. He stumbles right up to Jesus, tattered clothes dragging in teh dirt behind him. He falls down, knees to the earth, face in the dust - - and he demonstrages true faith by his plea:

“If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Perhaps that’s you, here this morning. “Will Jesus do anyting for ME?!” I’ve been focusing on the ones who don’t recognize their true condition. But there are those who know full well their state of need. You are panifully aware of the skeletons in your closet that you’ve been able to keep safely hidden from everyone … but Jesus is the Son of God - you know you can’t hide anything from His all-seeing eyes. Not a single impure thought goes unnoticed by the all-knowing holy God. You are utterly dependant for help on his WILL. So you join the leper in his cry:

“Lord, if you will … YOU and You alone CAN MAKE ME CLEAN.” … “Are you … willing?”

Well, look at Jesus’ answer. I love the way the action slows to a crawl. Back in verse 33, reporting on the action of the previous day, Mark tells us that a whole CITY gathered at the door where Jesus was staying. In v. 34, ‘He healed many who were sick.’ SNAP - every problem is gone. See the compassion on display in the crowd.

“And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’”

leprosy was especially symbolic of sin, and the healing of it especially a parable of deliverance from sin. R. C. Trench, the great Greek scholar and the inspiration for and first editor of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, recognized this. Though the leper was not worse or guiltier than his fellow-countrymen, he was nevertheless a parable of sin—an “outward visible sign of innermost spiritual corruption.”

Mark—Jesus, Servant and Savior (2 vols.) The Master’s Touch ( Mark 1:40-45 )

The nature of leprosy, with its insidious beginnings, its slow progress, its destructive power, and the ultimate ruin it brings, makes it a powerful symbol of moral depravity. If we see ourselves with spiritual eyes, we see that apart from the work of Christ we would be decaying forms of walking death.

Keeping this deeper meaning of leprosy before us, we are going to seek the lessons from the text under consideration.

Hughes, R. K. (1989). Mark: Jesus, servant and savior (Vol. 1, pp. 52–53). Crossway Books.

He was a leper in the final stages of decay. Luke described him as “covered with leprosy.” It’s a horrible disease, leprosy. It begins with little specks on the eyelids and on the palms of the hand. Then it spreads over the body. It bleaches the hair white. It casts a cadaverous pallor over the skin, crusting it with scales and erupting over it with oozing sores.

Mark—Jesus, Servant and Savior (2 vols.) The Leper’s Cry (v. 40)

leprosy, or Hansen’s disease as it is better know today (after the man who diagnosed its cause), is not a rotting infection as is commonly thought, nor are its horrible outward physical deformities imposed by the disease. In recent years, the research of Dr. Paul Brand and others has proven that the disfigurement associated with Hansen’s disease comes solely because the body’s warning system of pain is destroyed. The disease acts as an anesthetic, bringing numbness to the extremities as well as to the ears, eyes, and nose. The devastation that follows comes from such incidents as reaching one’s hand into a charcoal fire to retrieve a dropped potato, or washing one’s face with scalding water, or gripping a tool so tightly that the hands become traumatized and eventually stumplike. In Third-World countries, vermin sometimes chew on sleeping lepers. Thus, Dr. Brand, after performing corrective surgery on a leper, would send a cat home with him as normal post-operative proceedure. Dr. Brand calls the disease a “painless hell,” and indeed it is. The poor man in our story had not been able to feel for years, and his body was full of leprosy, mutilated from head to foot, rotten, stinking, repulsive.

Mark—Jesus, Servant and Savior (2 vols.) The Leper’s Cry (v. 40)

It was illegal to even greet a leper. Lepers had to remain at least 100 cubits away if they were upwind, and four cubits if downwind. Josephus, the famous Jewish historian, summarized by saying that lepers were treated “as if they were, in effect, dead men.” There were no illusions in this leper’s life as to who he was and what his condition was.

And if the physical stigma of the disease isn’t enough, the rabbis attach a moral stigma to it as well. They believe it to be a direct blow by God on the backs of the sinful. And with that belief comes a rigid catechism of cause and effect platitudes—“No death without sin, no pain without transgression.” For them, leprosy is a visual symbol of moral decay. It begins with a small speck that slowly but surely destroys the individual.

Gire, Ken. Moments with the Savior (Moments with the Savior Series) (p. 111). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

He lives not only with the horror of the disease but also with its shame and its guilt. There is no cure for the man. He is forced to live outside the walls of the city, shuffled off to a leper colony. There, on the far horizons of humanity, he is sentenced to live out his days. Again, another symbol. This time of his separation from God.

At the colony, food is lowered to the entrance of his cave, a cave crowded with the miserable and the hopeless. Then those who brought the food scurry away like frightened barn mice.

The leper’s life is one of isolation. Like the disease, the isolation progresses gradually but completely. First his peripheral friends drop out of sight. Then his closer circle of friends constricts, shrinking smaller and smaller until, at last, he’s left with only a tiny center of immediate family. And, one by one, even they stop coming by so often. Then he realizes his mother is the only one who comes anymore. Her visits are shorter and less frequent. And she stands farther away, without looking him in the eyes as she used to.

The hollow cave he lives in is a symbol too. A symbol of his loneliness.

Gire, Ken. Moments with the Savior (Moments with the Savior Series) (pp. 112-113). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Mark—Jesus, Servant and Savior (2 vols.) The Leper’s Cry (v. 40)

this man suddenly appeared, plowing through an amazed crowd like the determined prow of a boat with its compass set on Jesus. When he arrived, he lay on the ground before Jesus, a mass of rotting flesh. Luke the physician, in a parallel account (Luke 5:12), describes him as “covered with leprosy.” The disease had run its course. None of us needs a detailed description of the poor man’s loathsome appearance. If you have seen just one picture of someone full of leprosy, that one picture is enough.

Trembling with excitement, he dares what he would never do with a rabbi. He dares to draw near. As he does, the crowd parts dramatically. A leper is in their midst. Some stand by silently and watch the lowly reverence of his approach. Others murmur their indignation. But no one stands in his way. He stops within arm’s distance of Jesus and falls at his feet. The man looks up and begs. His plea is halting yet direct, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus looks at the glimmer of faith in the man’s sunken eyes. He looks at the ashen skin. He sees the sores. He sees the shame. Without beauty, without bloom, this pale, wilted flower bows before the Savior. A grim reminder of how the thorns have taken over paradise.

Gire, Ken. Moments with the Savior (Moments with the Savior Series) (p. 113). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Mark—Jesus, Servant and Savior (2 vols.) The Leper’s Cry (v. 40)

The less we know that there is anything wrong with us, the more full-blown our leprosy is! It is common to say, “Hey, I’m OK!” while we have the death of leprosy in our very souls.

That is why in preaching and sharing the Good News it is our fundamental duty to alert people to their condition. Dr. Lloyd-Jones, who for years held forth in London’s Westminster Chapel, said it is a spiritual necessity to have a sense of sin.

What is more, unless you have experienced that, unless you have known that, you are not a Christian, you do not believe in Christ as your personal Saviour. Until you realise that you cannot possibly have felt the need of Christ; you may have felt the need of help and advice and comfort, but until you awake to the fact that your nature itself is evil, until you realise that your trouble is that you yourself are wrong, and that your whole nature is wrong, until you realise that, you will never have felt the need of a Saviour. Christ cannot help or advise or comfort you until He has first of all saved you, until He has changed your nature. Oh, my friends, have you yet felt this? God have mercy upon you if you haven’t. You may have been inside the church all your life and actively engaged in its work, but still I say (and I am merely repeating what is said repeatedly in the Bible) that unless you have at some time or other felt that your very nature itself is sinful, that you are, in the words of St. Paul, ‘dead in sin’ then you have never known Jesus Christ as a Saviour, and if you do not know Him as a Saviour you do not know Him at all.

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2 THE COMPASSION, v. 41

But here, in v. 41, the text slows the action right down to a crawl: “Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him ...”.

He TOUCHED Him. Don’t miss the significance of that touch. The Old Testament tells us that contact with a leper makes the clean person polluted - It doesn’t work the other way! Leprosy trumps health.

Oh, how many years has this poor man gone wthout human touch. A couple of years? Five years? Ten years? Since the day te priest pronounced the life-ending verdict: “You are, indeed, unclean” - ever since that day, this man has never felt the touch of another.

Imagine the farewell scene: His wife meets him at the city gates with a sack of clothes, bread, some coins. His closest friends gather to say goodbye. What this man saw in thei eyes was a precursor to what he has seen in every eye since - fearful pity. As he steps out, they instinctively, protectively, step back.

Levitical regulations require the leper’s outer garment to be torn, the hair unkempt, and the face partially covered. He dresses as a mourner going to a burial service—his burial service. And he must call out to those he passes on the way, “Unclean! Unclean!” An announcement both of his physical and moral death. He must keep at least six feet away when he passes. And as he passes, he is shunned. Little children run from him. Older ones shoo him with stones and sharp-cornered remarks. Adults walk on the other side of the street, mutter a prayer for him under their breath, shake their heads in disgust, or simply look the other way.

His is a hard life of muted grays that grow darker and darker with each day. He huddles in the cold and shadowy recesses of that cave with only occasional, faint echoes entering from the outside world. There he lives. Without love. Without hope. Without the simple joys and dignities of life: being smiled at . . . being greeted on the street . . . buying fresh fruit in the market . . . talking politics by the public fountain . . . laughing . . . getting up to go to work . . . operating a business . . . haggling over prices with a shopkeeper . . . getting a wedding invitation . . . singing hymns in the synagogue . . . celebrating Passover with family. All these are barred to him. Forever. I wonder. How long has it been since someone has shaken his hand . . . patted him on the back . . . put an arm around his waist . . . rubbed his shoulders . . . hugged him . . . stroked his hair . . . touched his cheek . . . wiped a tear from his eye . . . or kissed him? He wakes early this morning from a dream of those times, when people loved him, touched him. But it’s just a dream. Reality is the cave. And the colony.

“Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean.”

But now … but HERE - the broad, calloused hand of the infinitely pure and holy, incarnate Son of God … HE touches … preses against the scaly rotting flesh of a lonely outcast leper, with nothing to offer but the stench of his rotting need. Let that image become etched in your mind - it’s massively important.

Does Jesus HAVE to touch him? Of course not - even if he wants to heal the man, Jesus doesn’t have to touch him. This is the One who spoke the word of command and sun and moon appeared out of nothing. Surely he can say a single word and the cursed leprosy would flee away. He can create health out of disease with a word AND keep his hands clean.

But He doesn’t. Jesus chooses to violate every medical warning, to break every social taboo … and TOUCH. In the entire Old Testament, there are only TWO recorded miraculous healings of leprosy: Moses’ sister, Miriam and Namaan the Syrian. Miriam was healed by Moses’ prayer; Namaan was healed by obeying God’s command to dip himself 7 times in the Jordan River. In neither case did anyon dare to actually touch the leper. Jesus does. You see, he’s making a point. Jesus is saying here:

“I make the choice, by my own free-will, to BECOME what you can NOT help but be, from birth.”

I choose to touch you and let your disease become mine, so that your sick, decaying body can be infused with my transforming, life-giving power.

The sight fills Jesus with compassion. He reaches out to touch the man. Reaches out to touch the leper. The gesture says so much to someone nobody speaks to anymore, let alone touches. It says, “I love you. I care. I’m sorry. I understand. I want to help.”

And with that touch, goose bumps flutter over little pools of feeling that still remain on his skin. Jesus doesn’t delay in putting an end to the man’s suffering. “I am willing. Be clean.”

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3 THE CURE, vv. 42-45

AND IT WORKS - see the cure, in vv. 42-45.

“And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 45) But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.”

The man gets up, off of his knees and he’s cleansed. The white, scaly sores of decay are replaced with fresh, pink flesh.

V. 43: “And Jesus sternly charged himand sent him away at once, (44) and said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleasing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.’

“… Go - show yourself to the human authority” - the priest is the one who could recognize what was diseased and what was not - though he could NOT do a thing to help) … Go and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” … A proof that the GREAT HEALER HAS COME!

In this example,, Jesus demonstrates his power to heal a leper - sure. But, he also makes another point - - He is demonstrating how he will use that power to bring glory to himself. He is going to identify with us IN our sin - - He will take on himself the judgment of God against that sin and transfer His righteousness - - the glorious purity that belongs to him becomes ours.

Don’t miss how this scene points us forward to the cross, where, as Paul puts it, in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

If you ever get to San Francisco, you have got to make plans to visit Alcatraz on that lonely rock, in the San Francisco Bay. What a fascinating place to tour! The most secure prison they knew how to make, in its day. There was a saying in the States, back in the day: “Break the rules and you go to prison. Break the prison rules and you go to Alcatraz.” But almost to a man, every prisoner locked up at Alcatraz thought they didn’t belong there.

One of the most interesting parts of tour is hearing th stories of the many escape attempts - some of them were elaborate plans, that took years to plan, using only the stuff that could be found around the prison - a button here, a pillowcase there … these inmates would do literally anything to get away from ‘those criminals’ they were stuck with - and stop ‘being touched’ by their presence.

Jesus does EXACTLY the opposite. Whenever you come to Jesus, with a broken heart - wondering, ‘Does Jesus have patience for me? Will He reach for me … again?

… Know this, friend: Jesus is not just willing to heal you and cleanse you afresh … He was willing not just to touc hyou with outstretched finger … He was willing to touch you to His own destruction … SO THAT He could rise with eternal healing in His wings.

On the island of Molokai

Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 34A: Mark 1–8:26 Explanation

a leper who in Judaism can only be healed by God, a feat comparable to the raising of the dead. Both the healing of the leper and the raising of the dead were to be characteristic of the age of salvation (cf. Matt 11:5 // Luke 7:22). Thus, the account portrayed Jesus’ eschatological role in his healing.